50 Years After Hiroshima

Nuclear Protesters Collect Their Thoughts

When news of the mushroom cloud soaring above the gray ruins of Hiroshima reached University of Chicago physicist Leo Seren exactly 50 years ago this Sunday, it confirmed his darkest fears.

Three years earlier, Seren, working on the project, had been poking around apartment houses in Hyde Park with a neutron detector, checking for radiation leaks from a secret experiment under the university's football stands.

He found some. Not much, but some.

Aware of the power of the unchained nuclear energy to mutilate as well as kill, Seren had petitioned the U.S. government not to drop such a bomb on a populated area but to demonstrate its doomful potential by targeting an isolated northern Japanese island with advance warning.

His advice was ignored. In the waning days of a vicious world war it did not seem to be the worst single calamity endured by civilian populations.

Six months before the bomb fell, author Kurt Vonnegut, a prisoner of war, was locked up in an abandoned slaughterhouse under the city of Dresden as Allied bombers set off a firestorm above, incinerating 135,000 people.

But Hiroshima, though lower in deaths, entered the language as a one-word shorthand for the wider powers of a new engine of human destruction.

At the moment the bomb exploded, therapist Hideko Tamura, who now lives in Villa Park, was lying on a futon, reading a novel in her parents' palatial home in Hiroshima. A "white waterfall" of light fell from the sky, she recalls. It was followed by a explosion that gripped and shook the earth. "The sun," she adds, "disappeared in thick black air and swirling wind."

On Sunday afternoon, the 50th anniversary of the first time that an atomic weapon was deliberately used on human targets, Seren, Vonnegut and Tamura will be among the speakers at a commemoration that promises to be one of the largest in the nation to mark the destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In what will be part tribute to the victims, part soul-searching and a global look forward, the service will be in the setting that became the touchstone for the countless peace groups that arose after the war: the University of Chicago.

It was there, of course, that the formula for nuclear destruction was created.

"I personally regret that I worked on the Manhattan Project," Seren, an Evanston resident, said in an interview this week. "For me, the message is that nuclear bombs are terrible things for our civilization. We ought to get rid of all of them."

During the dark days of World War II, Seren was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, working with Enrico Fermi on a key part of the puzzle of how to make a bomb that would unlock the energy of the uranium atom.

"It was very exciting," recalled Seren, who taught physics for many years after the war and now works on solar projects. "There was tremendous urgency to get the thing going."

After three years of experimentation, fearful that the Nazi war machine was ahead of them, Fermi's team was testing various ways of stacking graphite, uranium and cadmium control rods into a pile. It was an arrangement that later would be called a nuclear reactor.

"I was in charge of the counting room, where we had detectors to measure the density of neutrons of the various piles," Seren said. On Dec. 2, 1942, a date enshrined in Henry Moore's sculpture, "Atomic Energy", on South Ellis Avenue, under what were once the University of Chicago's football stands, the pile reached critical mass, producing a self-sustaining chain reaction.

It was the start up of the atomic age-an era that, to Seren, has been a disaster for mankind, the environment and the future of the planet.

"When the piles went critical, neutrons were escaping into the neighborhood," Seren said. "One of my duties, after Dec. 2, 1942, was to put neutron detectors up to a block away in apartment buildings in Hyde Park."

The levels escaping into the neighborhood from unshielded piles, he says, were not a major danger to health. But one problem with unwanted radiation, he said, is that "it is cumulative. It builds up with detrimental effects."

That, Seren warned, is a remaining danger from all of man's diversions of atomic energy. "We have no need of nuclear bombs or its sister industry, the nuclear power industry," he said. "If we put the same scientific resources into developing solar and wind energy that we put into the Manhattan Project, we could get all the energy we would ever need-with no pollution."

Organized by almost 100 Chicago-area groups of peace, human rights, environmental, religious and scientific activists, Sunday's events will include a children's program at 3 p.m. at the Henry Moore sculpture. At 4:30 p.m., a program of speeches and music will begin in Rockefeller Chapel.

The theme of the day is to put the past behind and work toward eliminating nuclear weapons and direct the world's resources toward peaceful projects.